The idea is that the people who no longer offer any services that can't be performed by robots are economically useless. The only form of wealth would be ownership of resources, not labor. If that happens, the owners of resources can do whatever they want to the ex-workers.
There is already a large and growing creative class. There is also a sizable and growing leisure class that doesn't need to work full time to make ends meet.
I think the myth here is that there is a tiny cabal of people that would control everything. They wouldn't be tiny: they would be public companies with many, many thousands of shareholders.
1) There's nothing that humans can't do that sufficiently smart robots can't, per the Turing Equivalence Theorem.
2) There are a lot of people who aren't smart to join the creative classes. Assuming that robots remain dumb and can only do the kind of work that people with IQs of, say, 100, do, that means people with IQs of 100 or less would be unemployable.
3) Goods and services would become cheaper so you probably wouldn't have to have a lot of capital to survive even if you lost your job, so the "cabal" probably wouldn't be tiny. But you would still have to have some capital or you would be completely dependent on the good graces of those who do, (or those who can coerce them, ie the government). Lots of people in the US have negative net worths.
The point here is not that there wouldn't be lots of winners, but that there could potentially be a lot of losers, depending on how wealth is distributed.
1. You're treating the future as an "us" vs. "them" - a common bias. We'll have human cognitive enhancers before we solve hard AI.
2. The richer we get, the easier it will be to make a living in a creative class.
3.We already have a huge chunk of society that are negative net worths.
I completely agree that there could be lots of losers. I also agree with another comment that the issue is the rate of change. Too fast, and you get disruption. But you don't get the bullshit in manna. That story is bad scifi imho
Eh, not so sure it's bad sci-fi, given that it's not far from historical norms.
Most of human history is a comparative handful of people executing effective control over most of the available resources, isolating themselves in heavily-barricaded encampments and putting lots of effort into maintaining that control (castles/cities/gated-and-guarded-communities/etc).
It's a pretty stable equilibrium: once you've got effective control over most of the available resources, you can easily afford to maintain your barricades, and if on the other hand everyone else is effectively shut out from those resources it's going to be pretty hard to organize much of a revolt; most of the shake-ups are due to sudden shifts in technology or unexpected "black swan" events (eg a mongol invasion or a plague).
The exact nature of the relationship between the barricaded and the rest varies with circumstance: sometimes the rest are useful for labor (like tilling the fields), or to raise an army; in the modern era it's often the case that the rest are left to fend for themselves, at least as long as they're not causing trouble.
You don't have to travel far to see the same pattern surviving into the present era: just go to Argentina, or Brazil, or Africa, etc.
So social organization resembling the dystopia in "Manna" has been more-or-less the normal human experience since Sumeria, if not earlier, and is still existent today for maybe 20-40% of the world's population (depending on where you draw your lines); it's possible that "western" modernity -- of the sort you have in the US/EU/Japan/Korea/ -- marks a turning point in history, but it could just be a brief interlude between variants-on-the-theme-of-feudalism, also.
On the face of it Manna is cartoonish and whatnot, but positing a return to quasi-feudalism is pretty much betting on mean reversion, which could be a bad bet but isn't necessarily comical.
